Fundraising with CanadaHelps

Fundraising with CanadaHelps is a wonderful way to bring your family, friends or co-workers together in support of the charities you care about most. It’s also a wonderful way to bring people together to celebrate a special day with gifts that will make a difference in the lives of so many Canadians.

Birthdays, weddings or graduations are great opportunities to fundraise. Sporting events, reunions and personal challenges can also be easily transformed into charitable events. But you don’t need a special occasion: any day is a good day to help out people across the country and around the world.

We make it easy. To set up a Fundraising page, you simply select the charities you want to support and add an explanation for why each is important to you. You can add photos or videos to your page and display your progress toward the goal you set.

Your supporters can donate any amount they want to any – or all – of the charities you add to your page. When they do, we’ll display the names of your donors, alongside any personal messages they leave for you (unless they prefer to remain anonymous).

See for yourself how easy it is: create a Fundraising page now. 

Keep your audience in mind. If most of your supporters are likely to know you personally, they’ll probably want to hear why each of the charities you’ve chosen matter to you as an individual. If you expect lots of visitors whom you’ve never met, focus your message instead on why donors should care about the work each charity does.

You’ve heard that a photo is worth 1,000 words. So, adding images and videos to your page can go a long way toward making a compelling argument for a gift to the charities you’ve chosen.

Goals can be important, too. If visitors to your page see that you’re only a short distance from reaching the dollar goal you’ve set – or if there are only a few days left in the fundraising period you’ve established – they may feel a more urgent need to help out.

We don’t limit the number of charities you can add to your Fundraising page. But keep in mind that the most successful efforts are often those which appear focused.

Keeping the number of charities small – 8 or fewer – makes it easier for donors to decide which charities to support. Too many, and people may feel a bit overwhelmed by the number of choices.

When people contribute to your Fundraising page, they’re making a donation, just the same as when they contribute elsewhere on our site. We send each donor a tax receipt immediately after he or she completes the donation.

We send your donation to the charities you support on a regular schedule.

95% of donations made using CanadaHelps are directed to charities that have set up electronic fund transfers (EFTs), and to whom we transfer funds once every week. Donations made from Sunday to Saturday are disbursed the following Friday. It can take a few days to clear in the charity’s bank account, depending on its arrangements with its bank.

For charities that have not signed up for a free account and set up electronic fund transfers (EFTs), we issue a paper cheque. We send those cheques once a month.

Occasionally, a charity will change its address or banking information and forget to update CanadaHelps, which leads to a delay in the charity receiving your donation. As a trusted charity ourselves, it’s critical to us to make all reasonable and best efforts to honour donors’ wishes, so CanadaHelps makes multiple attempts to contact the charity for correct information. If we cannot get updated banking information from the charity to send the funds via EFT, we will send your donation to the charity by cheque.

If we are unable to get the information we need to transfer the funds electronically, and if a cheque cannot be delivered to or cashed by a charity, we will contact you, the donor, for further direction.

In very rare cases (representing 0.007% of the donations we process), we are unable to disburse funds to the intended charity by EFT or cheque, and we are unable to get direction from the donor after multiple attempts. In these cases, after 18 months the funds become undisbursable and are reinvested into CanadaHelps’ charitable operations.

That’s where your ingenuity really makes a difference.

We assign your Fundraising page a unique web address (URL) on our site so you can share it with anyone you know. Post it to your social media sites, like Facebook, Yahoo!, Google+, Twitter or Tumblr. Send it in an e-mail to your friends, family or co-workers. Print it on flyers to post around town or the office; hand them out at parties or the gym.

Ask the people you know to share your page with their extended networks, too. The more people who see your page and know about your fundraising effort, the more donations you’re likely to collect.

There are several important reasons why you should fundraise using CanadaHelps, as opposed to other online crowdfunding platforms:

• It’s easy to set up, and the result is a high impact page that will inspire your friends and family to support your cause
• Donations to your fundraiser are automatically disbursed directly to the selected charity
• All of the people who donate to your fundraiser will receive a charitable tax receipt
• As a charity, we offer non-commercial rates; that means more money will go directly to your cause than with alternative for-profit services
• CanadaHelps is a trusted charity, with a spotless record for safe and secure online donations.

To learn more about why you should fundraise using CanadaHelps, click here.